Those Ukrainians who died while aid was withheld

[intrepidity]

Dems, want to use an R tactic? Find the families of those Ukrainians who died in battle against Russians while US aid was being withheld.

Talk to them about the loved one they lost.

Don't sermonize me about how we are better than that.

That is brass tacks. Show the HUMAN cost juxtaposed with Trump's personal political agenda.

Just do it.

[braddy]

1. I wouldn't go there, people will start looking at the timeline of the years when the weapons were

refused, and when they were approved.

[Igel]

2. So it's only an important point when it works in our favor?

I'd do something different. I'd look at whether the aid would have mattered.

If you're killed by a sniper across 3-year-old enemy lines and the aid was anti-tank munitions, then I don't see the relevance in the aid to the death. If it was body armor, there's relevance. Unless the guy in question (whoever it might be) was shot in the head while he had his helmet off.

In other words, the claim is that all the deaths are relevant to the denial of aid, and the proof is that the deaths are mentioned in the context of denial of aid. In other words, the context is taken as evidence of a claim, without critical thinking getting in the way of conversational implicature. That's the kind of "logic" (it's not logic, but we think of it as "logical&quot

It's rhetoric. It's Madison Avenue advertising. It's Lakovian "framing". But it has little to do with truth, and since so many make such a slight difference between veridicality and such "fake truth" it's really worthy shouting, jumping up and down, and firing flares off to signal the problem whenever possible.

[braddy]

3. If you look at the years that Ukraine was denied Javelins and other lethal weapons, it doesn't help

us.

[intrepidity]

4. WaPo fact-checks this talking point

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/11/14/fact-checking-opening-day-trump-impeachment-hearings/

Nunes repeated a talking point often made by Trump (and which is listed in our database of Trump’s false and misleading claims) — that Obama only provided “blankets” to Ukrainian security forces. The suggestion is that Obama did not provide security aid to Ukraine, but this is wrong.

After Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, the Obama administration supplied Ukraine with $600 million in security assistance, according to a 2017 Congressional Research Service report. A 2015 Defense Department news release said Obama had pledged 230 Humvees, along with unarmed aerial vehicles, counter-mortar radars, night vision devices and medical supplies.

Obama also signed into law the establishment of the Defense-managed Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which has built on that initial aid. From fiscal year 2016 to fiscal year 2019, Congress appropriated $850 million, the CRS said in another report, with another $250 million slated for 2020. (The fiscal 2019 appropriation is what Trump blocked over the summer, witnesses have said, in order to pressure Ukraine to announce an investigation of former vice president Joe Biden.)

Obama was wary of supplying lethal aid to Ukraine, for fear of antagonizing Russia when Ukrainian security forces were weak (and also European allies who were wary of an escalation). It was not an isolated concern. Fiona Hill, who joined the Trump administration as the top Russia adviser on the National Security Council, in 2015 co-wrote an opinion piece in The Washington Post warning against supplying lethal weapons because it could lead to a regional war. In her deposition to impeachment investigators, she said circumstances had changed by 2017.

Also,

Even so, while the Trump administration supplied the Javelin antitank weapons long sought by Ukraine, the weapons came with the restriction that they cannot be used in the ongoing conflict with the Russian-led separatists — precisely because of the escalation issues that had concerned the Obama administration.

“The special U.S. envoy for Ukraine, Kurt Volker, has said that the Javelins are being stored in a secure facility far from the front line,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported in June. “Ukrainian and U.S. sources with knowledge of the storage locations have told RFE/RL that the missiles and launchers have been separated into smaller groups and are held in strategic locations around the country, possibly in underground bunkers, where they can be moved quickly to areas that border Russia or the eastern front line.”

More at link, but that's the rough outline.

[braddy]

5. Read it again, lethal weapons.